I decided it would be a great idea to try my first hand cut dovetails on an important project :). No time for screw ups or do-overs here. One shot.

But first a change of plans. I was going to leave the drawer front to include the bottom molding in a single unit that would slide in to fit the opening and top but I decided to make the bottom molding a fixed stile and the flat drawer face slides in the middle between the top and bottom moldings. It seems more typical that way. Retro fitting the bottom stile as an afterthought was tricky.

To sculpt the decorative profile on the top of the legs a router bit wouldn’t do so I tried using scratch stock to form the two outside beads. It works pretty good, better than I thought especially on hard maple. It’s literally a rounded shape filed on the edge of a piece of metal then clamped in place and scratched or pushed/dragged along to wood until you scrape away the wood.

I got these brass decorative feet that go in the tips of the table legs to give it that Duncan Phyfe look. The inside shape and fit was really odd so I had to do a lot of shaping to get them to fit on.

I made my version of the crown stops available as an accessory for my mitre saw. They were way too expensive so I made my own.

I didn’t make them for holding crown moulding, I made them because I wanted to clamp things to the top like stops, left or right clamping (since I had only one clamp), and for holding smaller workpieces where the stock clamp wouldn’t reach.

I made an improvement to my mitre saw. The clamp that comes with the saw is too far away from the blade and I sometimes have to cut small parts that won’t reach the clamp.

There’s no way I’m holding them with my hand so I made a platform that you can clamp on the top of the saw. I put T-tracks on the top so you can slide clamps in at different positions to hold the workpiece down safely.

The table also doubles as zero-clearance for the blade below and in back by the fence so it improves dust collection even more.